


Frozen Glass

by Caraphernellic



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Case Fic, F/M, Fluff, MSR, Pining, Romance, brief mentions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:15:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25716412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caraphernellic/pseuds/Caraphernellic
Summary: Shattered glass, snow, and secrets; a normal night spins out of control for Scully, and the consequences separate her from Mulder. Neither of them was ever any good with distance.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	1. Chapter 1

“Mulder, it’s me.” 

Scully is relieved that her partner has answered on the first ring. She is driving back from picking up important documents pertaining to their case. Skinner has been on Mulder’s ass lately and they couldn’t risk him going against protocol to obtain the documents, and so she had agreed to go alone.

Scully regrets this decision only due to the change in weather for her drive home. The snow is falling in thick, fluffy flakes that clump quickly and obscure her visibility even with her windshield wipers on high. The accumulation on the roads has already reached a few inches, with no signs of stopping soon. She is currently driving down a back road with no street lights, the ink-black of the night only cut by her own headlights and the falling snow.

Mulder inquires on how the trip went and she provides him with the details, grateful for some semblance of company on her journey. Scully glances in her rear view mirror, once, twice- notices that the same vehicle has been following her for a few miles. She makes a random turn at the next opportunity and sure enough- the other car follows as well.

“Mulder, someone is tailing me.”

“You’re what, less than an hour away? Keep driving straight to the bureau, I’ll meet you there.” He sounds calm, self-assured, but both of them know it’s purely for her benefit, just as they also know that the documents in the vehicle are worth injuring an FBI agent for.

Scully attempts to go marginally faster, but the tires of the bureau-sanctioned vehicle slip on the snow, unequipped to handle the weather. The car behind her is slowly catching up, now less than a vehicle’s length between them. Within moments, it bumps her car’s rear end, jolting her heartily.

“Mulder, they’re trying to run me off the road!” Panic bleeds into her voice as she struggles to keep control on the snowy roadway. Her knuckles squeeze the steering wheel until they are bone white.

“Scully, describe the vehicle to me.” Her partner requests the details in the event that the situation goes south, although he’s praying to whatever being may be out there that it doesn’t. He needs to be prepared for all outcomes.

“Uh, black car. Uh, Buick I think. Couple of years old.” Scully’s car is bumped once more from behind, and then the Buick gains traction and moves up to the side. It rams her from the passenger side, and she swerves violently.

“I don’t think I can hold on!” 

“Scully-” He is cut off by several loud sounds.

“Mulder!” The final blow into Scully’s vehicle sends her careening off the road and down an embankment, the car’s momentum abruptly stopped by a tree as a corner of the front end snags on it. The motion of the sudden halt gives her whiplash. The airbag then deploys and pushes her back against her seat, pain immediately blooming across her face from the impact. A trickle of blood runs from her nose to her collar.

The phone slipped from her hand during the ordeal and is now on the floor; she can hear Mulder distantly calling her name.

She is too dazed to notice the figure approach her vehicle, until the glass smashes and a hand grabs roughly at her shoulder. She is pulled out through the window, shards of glass that stubbornly refused to break and fall away with the rest now tearing at her clothing. 

Mulder listens intently, shuffling noises and shattering glass filling his ears. The last thing he hears from Scully is obscured by the distance between her and the phone “-headliner.”

He has no idea what it means, but he scribbles it on a notepad before grabbing his coat and leaving the apartment to go straight to the bureau.

He places a call to the Lone Gunmen first, and then calls Skinner to fill him in. He leaves out the details of Scully’s destination and what exactly the documents are when discussing with the Assistant Director.

~

“Who are you?!” Scully yells as she scrambles for purchase as she is pulled out of her car. Her hand grapples with the side mirror but slides off due to the precipitation. She struggles with her attacker, both parties slipping and sliding in the snow. She hits her knees hard, the cold wet feeling of being soaked in snow momentarily paralyzing her.

A moment is all it takes, and a hard blow to the back of her head has Scully slumping over into unconsciousness. Her attacker drags her to his own vehicle and places her in the trunk before searching her car frantically. He does not find what he is looking for, and finally drives away, the Buick struggling up the embankment but making a slow ascent nonetheless.

~

Mulder rubs at his eyes, sipping at his coffee that has long gone cold. He has been with the Gunmen all night, combing through any and all reports of a black Buick in the area. He and Skinner had found Scully’s vehicle earlier in the night, on the side of the road about 45 minutes away, clearly run off the road and abandoned. Her window was smashed in- she’d been taken. The documents were also missing.

And everything was Mulder’s fault.

He is forced to go back home when they kick him out on the premise that he needs sleep, but how could he possibly sleep at a time like this? He thinks he’s heard the replay of Scully screaming his name a hundred times over by now. He sits on his couch, head in his hands for over an hour. He must have dozed off because the next thing he knows, he is sitting bolt upright with a realization of something he had seen when investigating Scully’s car.

Mulder paces until it’s a relatively decent hour (7:30am) before he can’t take it anymore. He calls Skinner once again and they meet at the precinct impound, where vehicles are kept that are involved in an investigation. He ducks into the backseat of Scully’s car and tugs on a tiny cloth corner of the ‘ceiling’. It comes undone easily and he is able to slip his hand under the fabric, which is now heavy and sagging with the weight of something since it has been unpinned.

Mulder pulls out the documents he had sent Scully to retrieve.

“Headliner. It was the last thing I heard her say, on the phone before she was taken.” He explains to Skinner. “She was trying to tell me that she had hidden the documents in the headliner of the car.”

“What are these, Mulder?” Skinner cuts right to the chase- he’s not stupid, he can put together the knowledge that his agents have gotten a hold of something that they shouldn’t have and are now paying the price.

“Evidence.” He responds, attempting to be intentionally vague.

“Evidence of  _ what _ ?” The Assistant Director demands.

“Of the existence of an inhuman life form and subsequent government coverup.” How many times had they come close to something like this; on the precipice but never quite crossing the threshold. And now, he holds hard proof in his hand.

It’s not worth it without Scully.

“Mulder, all this about aliens again?” Skinner pinches the bridge of his nose, sighing.

“I didn’t say aliens, sir, but inhuman life.”

“Let’s just focus on finding Agent Scully.”

~

Scully’s eyes burn and she blinks several times to clear the feeling. She doesn’t recognize her surroundings- a damp, cold concrete floor and identical walls. It seems like a basement of some kind, though she can’t begin to theorize where, why, or how.

It takes her a minute to remember the ordeal of being run off the road. She must have been taken here. She wonders whether whoever had done this found the papers that she had hidden for Mulder.

Mulder.

She knows he is looking for her, but she feels a sense of fear instead of comfort. This man is obviously dangerous and will stop at nothing to find what he's looking for. Scully hopes that her partner is careful in his search for her.

A dark figure appears behind the frosted glass embedded in the only door in the room. “You’re awake. Tell me, Dana, do you know why you’re here?”

She weighs her options and decides to play dumb, see how much this man knows. “No, I don’t.” Scully notes that she does not recognize her kidnapper’s voice.

“You have something I want. Information.” The figure shifts, but offers nothing else.

“Information about what?”

“I think you know.” The man walks away with that.

So that answers her question of whether the information had been found by her attacker. If someone is going through this much hassle to retrieve the documents, then they must hold some sort of truth.

Scully can only hope that her partner found the papers in her car and now has them in his possession, or this was all for nothing.

~

“Three black Buicks took a route the night that Scully was taken that could have led them to the road where we found her car abandoned. There are no traffic cameras on the specific road since it was a dirt path.” Mulder loosens his tie and uses his pointer finger to slide over photos of the owners of the vehicles.

“Two out of three owners have records. Chris Danes, arrested on charges of petty theft in ‘87 and ‘88. Herman Fedwig, assault with a deadly weapon in ‘92. And last but not least, no priors but still a suspect, Darren Wilkers.”

Skinner nods, taking half of the files to look over himself.

Hours seem to go by in a flash as they pore over the information- victim statements, police records, eyewitness accounts, anything and everything that might give them a clue as to who might be the person who kidnapped Scully- and why they want the information so badly.

Assuming it was the information they were after, of course. But they didn’t find it, and that doesn’t bode well for his partner. He shudders to think of what methods they might use to get her to confess to the knowledge.

“Mulder.” Skinner beckons him over and he stands, knees cracking from lack of use over the past several hours.

“Herman Fedwig isn’t from around here, he just came into town the night before she went missing. Checked into a motel nearby.”

It’s definitely suspicious, but not enough to convict the man, or prove that he did anything other than visit the city at an inconvenient time. A.D. Skinner senses Mulder’s hesitation and keeps going.

“He used to be an occult professor in Virginia, before he was fired due to allegations of misconduct- illegally downloading government files for the use of exploiting them to his students, claiming that it was the “Public’s right to know what’s really going on”. The assault with a deadly weapon charge was filed by the Dean of the college, after Herman pistol-whipped him in his office after being fired.” Skinner leans back in his chair, waiting for Agent Mulder’s response.

Mulder exhales- so this guy Fedwig was looking very good for the crime, but he still felt like something was missing. “We’ve got possible motive, and confirmation that he was in the area at the time of the crime, but no leads on where he might be hiding out.” He feels a flash of guilt once again, like a punch to the gut; hard, fast, and sickening.

“We’ll find her, Mulder.”

~

A young woman brings Scully to the bathroom a few hours after the dark figure spoke to her outside the door. She is blindfolded, led up a staircase, and finally into a bathroom. She tries her best to use her other senses to decipher where she might be. The other woman doesn’t speak, but Scully gets the sense that she is scared, from the hesitation in her movements and the way she occasionally flinches at the slightest of sounds.

Scully uses her hands to scoop up some water from the sink and drink it. She has no idea how long she was knocked out for, but she does know that her stomach is growling and her throat is parched.

“I don’t have the information he’s looking for.” Scully speaks to the girl on blind faith that she won’t rat her out.

“He knows.” Is the only response from the woman.

~

Mulder manages to catch a few hours of sleep out of sheer exhaustion. He is meeting with Skinner the next day at the motel Herman Fedwig is staying at to question the owner and do a search of his room.

The owner of the motel is cooperative and doesn’t seem to have anything to hide. However, he gives the agents a piece of information that for some reason makes Mulder’s stomach drop.

“Herman stays here a couple of times a year, always books the same room.” 

A pattern.

Skinner and Mulder exchange a glance and thank the man for his time.

Back at the bureau, the cold, sinking feeling in his stomach only grows as Mulder pulls a report of missing women in the area around the times of Herman’s visits. There is a missing woman that corresponds to each set of dates; a biologist, a pathologist, a new officer her second week on the job. The list boasts even more intelligent women in fields that could correspond to the man’s obvious obsession.

He hates the feeling that this is his own passion, reflected back at him from someone with insidious intent.

~

The first time he hits her, she cries out for Mulder. The blow of the whip across her back has both her skin and her mind singing out in terror and pain.

The man laughs.

“Just tell me where the documents are and I won’t have to hit you.” 

“Go to Hell.” Scully spits on the floor, blindfold preventing her from knowing if it even landed near her attacker. Her hands and feet are bound now, the rope cutting into her like the delicate skin of her wrists and ankles are no barrier at all for it.

A kick to her ribs has her macho-faćade quickly fading. It disappears altogether when he strikes her across the face, hard fast, unexpected, and her mouth fills with blood from where she has bitten her tongue.

She falls asleep that night on the cold concrete floor and dreams of Mulder. They’re across the room from one another, slowly drifting apart. The farther she moves from his warm hazel gaze, the colder and more filled with dread she becomes. Her arm stretches out to him but it’s too short- she’s too far.

_ “I’m sorry.” _

She isn’t sure which one of them in the dream had spoken the words.

~

Mulder goes back to the motel the next day to poke around. He walks around back of the place this time, eyes scanning the scrubby underbrush and trash that litter the scraggly grass behind the rooms.

He trips over his own feet and lands hard on his hands, one of his palms catching a stray shard of glass. He curses and gets up, reluctantly going back to the car and cutting his investigation short.

Mulder wraps a bandana around the cut on his hand, scrounged up from the car floor from where he had tossed it after the last time he meant to wear it running but got called into work. He is driving back home to take care of the wound, pointedly  _ not  _ thinking of his favorite red-haired doctor, when something dawns on him and he has to physically pull the car over.

When he had fallen, one hand had hit the shard of glass, but the other had hit a plank of wood- not the ground, but wood.

The kind of wood that might be the door to an old cellar.

He turns his car around immediately to head back the way he came, all of his senses screaming at him at once.

There’s no time to call for backup, although he knows Skinner will have his hide for it later.

Mulder pulls on the rusted handle of the now visible cellar door. A set of crumbling stairs lead into a dark, dank basement. At first, his eyes struggle to adjust, but then he is able to see an out-of-place door with a frosted glass window, as if the door was added in after the cellar had long been out of use. 

He pushes open the door and finds- nothing.

~

Scully and the woman make their way back from the bathroom again, but when she gets to the bottom, something stops her in her tracks, and the young woman bumps into the back of her due to her abrupt halt.

She smells Mulder’s shampoo.

She’d know the scent anywhere, woodsy and calming with a hint of something that’s just Mulder. 

Her eyes are still blindfolded, so she can’t see anything, but she’d guess he isn’t just standing out in the open if the woman isn’t saying anything. 

She is ushered into the room and the door is pulled closed behind her. The mystery woman doesn’t spend more time with Scully than she has to, again, Scully guesses, out of fear. 

A hand clamps over her mouth and she prepares to bite it, when someone whispers into her ear “Scully, it’s me.”

She sags against him with relief, and he holds her tightly. “I’m gonna get us out of here.” More footsteps are heard and they spring apart. She moves toward where she knows the door is so that she is more visible, and the attacker will be less likely to see further into the room and catch sight of Mulder.

Her abductor raps on the window with his knuckles, “Dana, did you miss me?” 

~

Herman Fedwig opens the door to the room, but doesn’t get it more than an inch before Mulder yells “FBI, hands up!”

He makes a lunge further into the room toward Scully, and a single shot rings out.

Herman’s reign of terror comes to an end within a split second.

Scully is still blind folded, and she calls out in panic “Mulder?!”

“I’m here.” He drops to his knees in front of her, removing her blindfold first, then untying her hands. There is dried blood in the corners of her mouth, a trail of it on her face, and her wrists are raw, but she seems to be okay, all things considered.

She throws her arms around him and he squeezes her. “I’m so sorry.” Mulder apologizes immediately.

“Sorry, for what? You found me.” Scully’s response is muffled in Mulder’s shirt, but neither of them is letting go for all the world at the moment.

“I’m the reason you’re here in the first place. You’ve been here for days.” His heart is squeezing painfully at the feel of her small body trembling in his arms.

“It’s not your fault.” Scully finally pulls back, and glances over at her abductor. He looks normal, like any man off the street. It’s terrifying.

~

They call Skinner, and an ambulance. Mulder, of course, gets his ass chewed out by the Assistant Director while Scully is being looked over in the back of the ambulance. He’s only half-listening, his eyes and mind focused on her.

“-reckless, unprofessional, you put both her and yourself in danger. And I don’t need to tell you-” Skinner’s voice fades in and out for him.

Scully goes to the hospital for an IV due to dehydration and to get further confirmation that she is well, not only from her ordeal, but from the car accident.

Herman Fedwig was a disgruntled working class man who was led by his delusions of government spies. His stressor was being fired from his day job- he began abducting women for information, and killing them when he didn’t hear what he wanted to hear- confirmation of his beliefs, or facts that would prove his theories. He had found the motel by chance, found the abandoned cellar behind room 14 and had used it to house his victims for years. The young woman, the owner’s niece, was an unwitting accomplice after falling into bed with Herman and finding herself unable to escape his abuse and manipulation.

The case was closed, and the string of previously unsolved abductions was now connected- the only thing that barely saved Mulder’s ass once again was a job well done.

The documents he and Scully had worked so desperately to obtain and protect were missing from the ransacked Lone Gunman office when Mulder went to retrieve them.

He is disappointed, of course, but to have his other half back by his side is more than enough.


	2. Epilogue

Mulder brings Scully home the day after her rescue. She had spent the night and much of the next day in the hospital resting, but was discharged the following evening. He begins the drive to her apartment in silence, but they’re not more than a few minutes into the ride when Scully speaks “Can we go to your place instead?” She doesn’t look at him, but he swears he can hear all of the other unspoken sentiments hidden in her question.

_ “Am I welcome there?” _

_ “Can I stay the night?” _

_ “I feel safer with you.” _

_ “I don’t want to be alone.” _

“Of course.” Mulder changes direction and pretends he didn’t hear her sigh of relief.

When they arrive, he hastily begins tidying up, too happy to have her there to be embarrassed at her knowing smile as she watches him.

“Can I use your shower?” Her mother had brought her clean clothes to the hospital, but he could understand why she would already want to be out of them. The smell of a hospital clings to you in an unpleasant way that can only be washed off.

He sets her up with fresh towels and leaves her to do her business, using the cleaning as an excuse to occupy his mind, instead of thinking about her taking a shower.

Scully, using his shower.

In his apartment.

Naked.

He realizes he’s sprayed the coffee table with cleaner three times in the same spot.

~

Scully turns the water up as hot as it can go, washing her hair with Mulder’s shampoo. That smell again, the smell of protection and safety.

She rifles through her bag after getting out, but everything her mother had packed her holds onto the stench of hospital. The smell reminds her so strongly of unpleasant memories- both recent and from far into her past- that she can’t bring herself to put any of them on. Scully makes sure that the towel wrapped around her is secure before she creeps out into the hallway, and then into Mulder’s bedroom. Surely he won’t mind if she borrows something.

She finds an old, worn-out Rolling Stones t-shirt that she has never seen him wear a single time, but was obviously well loved by him at some point. She has a vision of Mulder at Oxford wearing it, and finds herself with a goofy grin on her face. Scully slips on the shirt and, after being satisfied that it is indeed long enough to cover her butt and underwear, pads into the living room.

~

When he sees Scully, Mulder feels like one of those cartoon characters whose eyes bulge out as hearts while an ‘a-yoo-gah!’ sound plays in the background.

She is clad in only what he is certain is his vintage Stones tee, the collar so old and worn out that it slips over her shoulder and exposes her collarbone. As a whole, it dwarfs her tiny frame and acts as a nightgown. She catches him looking and raises an eyebrow, as if daring him to comment.

This is the Scully he loves, the spirited redhead who could steal your shirt and make you feel like questioning it was audacious.

Mulder had long since had these conversations in his head, these conversations that included the words ‘Scully’ and ‘love’ in the same sentence. 

The heart wants what the heart wants.

He makes them spaghetti to eat, one of the few meals he consistently has ingredients for in the house. She is quiet while he cooks, curled up on the couch underneath a blanket, pensive look on her face.

“I dreamed about you, when I was captured. We were drifting apart, and the farther we got….the worse I felt. I guess I just wanted to stay close, even if it’s just for tonight.”

“We can be as close as you want for as long as you want.” He tells her softly. 

Their lips meet as the snow begins to fall from the sky once more, ready to make the world look new again.

**Author's Note:**

> P.S. Apologies to anyone named Herman, I just decided it was the perfect name for my villain. Mwhahaha.
> 
> Thank you all for reading!


End file.
